"The credit system has a dual character immanent in it: on the one hand it develops the motive of capitalist production, enrichment by the exploitation of other's labour, into the purest and most colossal form of gambling and swindling, and restricts ever more the already small number of exploiters of social wealth; on the other hand however it constitutes the form of transition towards a new mode of production." Marx, Capital, Volume III, Chapter 27 (1894)